This letter, from New York Democrats for Life board member and State Senator Ruben Diaz, criticizes Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life, for endorsing the recent letter on abortion and religion signed by Catholic Democrats in the House. Diaz writes:
As a pro-life Democrat and elected official in one of the most liberal cities in the United States, I was shocked and dismayed to read your recent press release supporting a letter written by Rep. Rosa DeLauro and cosigned by mostly pro-abortion Democrats members of Congress. I found it to be deceptive and something I could never embrace.
Most of the letter's signers support unrestricted abortion and have a total disregard for the grave moral disorder in our society. And to me it is obvious that no child could enjoy the programs and policies mentioned in this letter if he or she fell victim to abortion. . . .
. . . Fighting for a good educational system, good health services, job creation, affordable housing, and other important social services equally available to all human beings, are some of the reasons that I am a public servant, however, as I said before, an aborted baby will never be able to enjoy these services. Therefore, it is the duty and responsibility of every good Christian, good Catholic and any pro-lifer to defend the sanctity of life and not allow the sagacity of these signees to distance us from our goals.
Here is the recent report, issued by Amnesty International, "Iraq, Beyond Abu Ghraib: Detention and Torture in Iraq." Here is the New York Times story on the report.
I have to confess that I didn't find the essay by Paul Lauritzen on the Terri Schiavo case very convincing. His main point is that the withdrawal of food and water didn't run afoul of Catholic teaching because the withdrawal didn't necessarily aim at death. Rather, Lauritzen claims, we are adopting a "let nature take its course" position and refusing to worship the false gods of technology in pursuit of "mere existence."
Putting aside the point that the providing food and water does not involve the use of high-tech care, I don't think this is a sound argument. Lauritzen claims that people such as Terri are in fact dying because of their natural inability to chew and swallow. We don't apply this way of thinking to most people in a state of dependency (infants who have a natural inability to feed themselves). As Bill May and others have pointed out patients in a persistent vegetative state are "not in fact dying from a fatal pathology. They are simply persons seriously impaired." The "problem" is that they are "biologically tenacious"--that is, they won't die soon enough, and that is precisely the aim of the withdrawal of food and water. Courts make this error all the time. The Florida courts in the Estelle Browning thought her death was "imminent" because she'd die within a short time without food and water. I think a reading of Lauritzen's essay makes clear that he doesn't think the lives of such patients are worth very much, or perhaps not worth anything at all. He explicitly denies this but I don't think the full essay supports his denial.
A better treatment of this issue is Mark Latkovic's fine article in volume 5 (pages 503-513) of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (Autumn 2005).
Check out this new paper, "The Equal Protection of Free Exercise," by Bernadette Meyler (Cornell):
Contrary to critics of the Supreme Court's current equal protection approach to religious liberty, this Article contends that, from the very first federal free exercise cases, the Equal Protection and Free Exercise Clauses have been mutually imbricated. The seeds of an equal protection analysis of free exercise were, indeed, planted even before the Fourteenth Amendment within the constitutional jurisprudence of the several states. Nor, this Article argues, should equal protection approaches be uniformly disparaged. Rather, the drawbacks that commentators have observed result largely from the Supreme Court's application of an inadequate version of equal protection that ignores the lessons that the Fourteenth Amendment taught about the nature of group classification and instead, by emphasizing the individual in isolation, downplays her free exercise claims. Considering this tendency within the context of current theories of group rights and antidiscrimination law, the Article concludes that we should resuscitate the now neglected, alternative strand of an equal protection approach to free exercise.
It appears that Connecticut -- a heavily Catholic state -- is considering requiring Catholic hospitals to provide "emergency contraception." (Thanks to Professor Friedman at Religion Clause for the link).
Here, at Prawfsblawg, are some interesting thoughts, by Prof. Paul Horwitz, about this week's unanimous decision by the Supreme Court in the Solomon Amendment case.
Although (contrary to what my friend Michael Perry would have you believe), the death penalty is constitutional, even if immoral, let me enthusiastically second his invitation to all New York-area folks to attend his upcoming lecture on capital punishment and the Constitution. I've read the paper he will be presenting, and it is learned and provocative.
